49-Cent Friday: Purple Dress Refashion

For this week’s 49-cent refashion, I started out with this awesome purple dress (that actually ended up costing less than 49-cents).

It has possibility!

Getting this dress for 49-cents was already a heck of a deal, but for less than that? I didn’t think it was possible.

Well, Mel Trotter (the thrift store I frequent the most often), not only has 49-cent sales on Mondays, but they also do punch cards!

Every time I spend at least $10.00 at their store, I get a punch on my card. When the card is full of punches, I can use it as a $10.00-off coupon!

This past Monday, I not only had a fully-punched card, but I found 30 items (at 50-cents each), to use the coupon on.

I got a cart-load of clothing, that normally would’ve cost $15.00. But after my coupon, I got them all for $5.00 (roughly 17-cents each!)

For the sake of continuity, we’ll still call it a 49-cent refashion. 😉

Anyway, back to the refashion.

I love the deep purple color and the overall look of this dress, but there were some definite things I didn’t like, for example…

Yuck! Shoulder pads!

I got busy removing those puppies first, using my seam-ripper.

My daughter wanted to keep them for a future refashion of her own…

Silly girl!

Another thing about the dress I wasn’t particularly fond of, was the too-tight elastic band that was stitched into the waist.

That elastic is really stitched in place!

It took some time to rip out all of those stitches, but I finally got the elastic removed.

This will come in handy for a future project!

Now that the two most obvious negatives were removed, I decided to re-do the length.

Shortening up that length!

To make sure it was cut evenly all the way across, I simply folded the cut part over the non-cut part, and used it as a guide.

A little tip I picked up from The Refashionista herself, Jillian Owens (well from her blog anyway).

Before moving on with the refashion, I really needed to give this dress a good ironing! It was quite wrinkly!

Steamy!

Do you like the cute top I’m wearing? It was another 49-cent (er um actually 17-cent) find! 🙂

Now that all the wrinkles are out, the hem needed to be pinned in place.

All that’s left to do is stitch!

Stitchin’ that hem.

After trying on the dress, I realized it was a bit wider in the skirt than I preferred, so I put it on inside out, and pinned where it needed to be taken in, removed the dress and straightened up the pins a bit…

Taking in the sides.

When I had all the pins situated just how I wanted them, I sewed the sides, trimmed off the excess fabric and this is how it turned out…

Finally some sunshine and warm temps! 🙂

My daughter was my photographer.

She kept telling me how to pose! 🙂

I’m really happy with how this turned out! It’s super comfy and it’s nice to have another dress to wear, now that it looks like we’re finally going to have some spring-like weather.

If you have any ideas for future refashions you’d like to see me do, or have any of your own you’d like to share, hit me up on Facebook! I’d love to connect with you there too! 🙂

Have a great weekend everyone!
~Jen

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